One Friday evening last month, in a seamy
America Online chat room devoted largely to trading child
pornography, Kelly Ray Jones of Fort Lauderdale seemed to be
looking for young flesh. As the police report later told it,
the 36-year-old office temp was joined in the busy Internet
room by a man we’ll call Bill, also in his mid-30s, who
reported having a 12-year-old son, Earl, and a 9-year-old
daughter. Using the screen name FTLBAREBACK, Jones first
contacted Bill through instant messaging, and FTLBAREBACK
quickly got down to what he wanted:

"What kinda pics and videos u
got?"

Great stuff, Bill responded. That
was good news for Jones, who wrote back that he was "real
turned on by young here." Bill, too, said he liked them young.
But Bill sounded a worried note: Was Jones by any chance a law
enforcement officer?

"Nope and don’t work for AOL.
Just horny as fuck for kids," Jones responded. Bill said he
lived in another town in Florida so Jones raised the prospect
of turning his fantasies into reality. After all, he already
had a few AVIS — computer video — files, and would "love" to
have one of him having sex with kids.

To underscore his desires, he
sent Bill several e-mails with photos of boys and girls as
young as 12 or under having sex with older men. They didn’t
leave anything to the imagination. These pictures were
followed by a clothed shot of Jones himself.

Jones worked fast, giving out his
cell phone number to Bill, and later that night, they spoke on
the phone to see if they could meet — and bring the kids along
for sex. Bill, however, drew the line at his 9-year-old
daughter, but Jones said it would be fine if he could just
have sex with the boy. Bill agreed, and they made preliminary
plans to meet the next weekend, with Bill accepting Jones’
suggestion to bring along a video camera to film it
all.

Jones, it seemed, was going to
hit his sex jackpot. He was seeking to add to his collection,
he told Bill, which already included mostly father-and-son
photos on his computer. He was "hunting and hunting" for
something like this, he told Bill shortly before they ended
their nearly half-hour conversation, and now his dreams seemed
ready to come true.

In truth, his nightmare was about
to begin. Unfortunately for Jones, his conversation had been
taped by "Bill" and all his e-mails and chats logged on a
police computer. Bill turned out to be Detective Neil Spector
of the St. Lucie County Sheriff’s Office and a member of the
Broward-based Law Enforcement Against Child Harm (LEACH) task
force, an interagency group dedicated to halting
Internet-related sex crimes, including luring children for sex
and trading child pornography. The local network has emerged
as a national leader among the 30 such federally funded LEACH
task forces around the country, and it has earned a
near-perfect conviction rate since being founded in 1998 under
the leadership of the Broward Sheriff’s Office
(BSO).

And for the LEACH detectives who
are on the frontlines in the war against Web-based child
pornography and sexual exploitation, the challenge of going
undercover in this booming but repulsive underground is worth
it. "It’s certainly not an easy thing to do," Spector says,
"but the person I’m talking to is a sexual predator I’m trying
to get off the streets. Our goal is to protect these
children."

In the Kelly Ray Jones case,
Spector moved quickly — and ultimately brought in other
detectives affiliated with LEACH — to pull off a successful
sting operation against Jones.

A few days after their first
talk, he used subpoenas to AT&T wireless and AOL to get
information that tied the phone and AOL screen name to Kelly
Ray Jones.

Jones, meanwhile, kept prodding
"Bill" about their planned orgy, unwittingly creating more
evidence that led to his arrest. "I can’t stop thinking about
doing this 3 way with you and Earl," he wrote.

Yet even as they exchanged
e-mails solidifying their plans, Jones began to express hints
of suspicion and frustration. On Tuesday afternoon, Feb. 20, a
few days before their planned Saturday meeting, he complained,
"I honestly have been dealing with nothing but liars lately
and have had one guy after another turn out to be a BS artist.
I don’t mind if someone likes the fantasy, but I don’t want
anyone to waste my time, either."

He added, "I was concerned when
talking to someone last night about police sting operations,
which is why I would feel more comfortable if you sent me
something like I sent you. Getting arrested is not how I want
to spend my weekend."

"It’s rather amusing," Spector
recalls now of that muted worry about being arrested. Even
with their doubts and the clear criminal penalties that face
them, alleged child molesters typically plunge ahead anyway,
sending kiddie porn or meeting with total strangers to arrange
sex with children.

(To understand Spector’s work
with LEACH, you’ll need a brief legal lesson on sex: It’s
illegal for anyone to have sex with kids under 16, but
prosecutors generally don’t go after consenting teenagers who
have sex among themselves. Adults 24 or older who have sex
with teens aged 16 or 17 are also breaking the law. Adults who
have sex with underage teens — or, of course, prepubescent
children — are prosecuted if caught. Medically, a "pedophile"
means someone who covets sex with children under 13, but
officers often use the term loosely to describe any adult
seeking underage sex. Pedophiles are overwhelmingly white and
male, and their targets are usually female. It’s also illegal
to use computer services to attempt to entice a child — or
"any other person believed to be a child" — to commit illegal
sexual acts.)

The mystery is why deviants
pursue illegal sex at such risk to themselves, but Spector
notes, "Once they get hooked on the temptation that they’re
going to have sex with a 12-year-old child, they can’t stop
themselves."

In any case, in a nighttime phone
call Jones expressed some lingering doubts about their
upcoming encounter, but also admitted to the detective posing
as Bill that he’d been anticipating their big Saturday
meeting.

They planned to meet at a hotel
at 11 a.m., and on Wednesday near 7 p.m., Jones contacted Bill
again by instant messaging. Jones didn’t know it, but he was
about to be placed under direct surveillance by Fort
Lauderdale Detective Rich Love, another LEACH investigator.
The aim was, in part, to establish that Jones was actually the
man online with Detective Spector, a critical finding in any
future prosecution. In the live chat, Jones talked of his
plans to bring along the injectable drug Caverject, which
promotes erections. And he expressed hope for more young sex
partners: "I wish you knew some other kids, too."

Do you mean for this Saturday?
Bill asked.

"Well, I think poor Earl could
only take so much," Jones answered. He added, "I have a
feeling you’re holding out on me on knowing more kids, but
hopefully after we meet, you’ll feel more
comfortable."

Suddenly, he wrote, "Doorbell
hold."

Outside, Detective Love, a trim,
silver-haired veteran of undercover work, was knocking on his
door. Jones went to answer the door, and Love, in an
undercover role, made up an excuse about why he was there. He
left soon afterward, but he was at the house long enough to
identify Jones as the man on the computer, the same man who
was in the photograph Jones sent to Spector.

Everything now was in place to
bust Jones on Saturday.

At 9:30 a.m., Jones pulled out of
his driveway in his new silver Nissan Xterra and went north on
I-95, trailed by an unmarked car with an FBI agent and a
Florida Department of Law Enforcement agent assigned to the
LEACH task force.

When he arrived at the hotel
parking lot, Jones didn’t see until it was too late the St.
Lucie County squad car that was hiding on the grounds and then
pulled in right behind him. A deputy got out and put him in
the green-and-white police car. Jones, a tall, thin,
dark-haired man whose secret life was now exposed, faced the
prospect of imprisonment and utter ruin. Detective Spector,
emerging from an unmarked car, stepped forward to read him his
Miranda rights.

"Why am I being arrested?" Jones
asked, as Spector recounts it.

Spector told him he was being
arrested as part of an Internet investigation and was being
charged with soliciting a child of 12 or under for sexual
battery.

"I don’t know what you’re talking
about," Jones insisted, adopting a confident air and claiming
he was there just to meet a friend.

His car was searched, and Spector
found Caverject, several syringes, condoms, a personal
lubricant, penis rings, Viagra, other sex paraphernalia, a new
stuffed teddy bear that he’d been told the boy wanted — and,
in his wallet, a small baggie with roughly a gram of crystal
meth.

Back at the sheriff’s office,
facing each other in the interrogation room, Spector finally
told him, "The person you’ve been talking to is
me."

Jones was stunned. He said, "I
want you to know that I’m not a bad guy."

Spector told him about the
evidence they had on him: the tape-recorded conversations and
the documents logging his instant messages and e-mails. "The
denials stopped," Spector recalls with evident satisfaction.
With the tape recorder on, Jones finally conceded he had gone
to the motel to have sex with the father and child, but
insisted that he didn’t think he would actually go through
with having sex with the boy. Still, a subsequent forensic
examination of his computer hard drive showed 100 child
pornography images including explicit sexual shots of children
as young as 6, according to Detective Spector. (The same
court-ordered search of his home also uncovered a few more
grams of crystal meth.)

"I call it a victory for us. The
good guys got one off the street. If it wasn’t for us [making
the arrest], there could be a real child victim. I felt really
good," Spector says.

Jones’ case is still pending,
though, and he was recently released from St. Lucie County
jail after his $750,000 bond was lowered. Jones faces drug,
sexual battery and child pornography charges that could put
him in prison for as long as 65 years on the original criminal
accusations; new charges based on the kiddie porn stash on his
hard drive haven’t been filed yet.

Spector charged at another bond
hearing last Friday that Jones violated the terms of his
release by warning users about Spector’s undercover operation
in a sexually oriented chat room, using the screen name
Copwarning. But since his roommate, Ken Wilk, asserted that he
was the one who went online under that name — and the state
couldn’t prove otherwise — a circuit court judge denied that
motion to increase the bond. Jones was arrested again last
Thursday for the original incidents because the state attorney
issued revised charges, but he was out on bond again the next
day.

The outrage at alleged child
molesters also sometimes translates into vigilante justice.
Wilk notes that Jones was beaten up while in jail and had
urine thrown at him; their dogs, he claims, have been
poisoned; and windows have been broken. Wilk asserts that
Jones was only engaged in fantasy discussions on the Web, that
parts of the police report are false and, he claims, "This is
basically an entrapment case."

Jones’ attorney David Seif says,
"We believe my client has strong defenses." At a bail hearing
in mid-March, Jones argued that all his talk about sex with
children was merely a fantasy discussion designed to play into
Bill’s perceived interests, serving as a prelude to a
hoped-for sexual encounter with him. He insisted that he
didn’t have any genuine interest in having sex with kids.
(That explanation, though, doesn’t seem to square with the
shots of kiddie porn he sent Spector or his extensive home
collection.) He also claimed that he’d only previously used
the Internet to meet adult gay men.

Spector challenges Jones’
assertion that he didn’t have any interest in child sex. "He
was totally predisposed," he says. "Why else would he be
sending us child porn?"

Spector and other LEACH
detectives say they avoid entrapment problems by making sure
they’re only responding to initiatives to commit illegal
sexual acts or trade pornography. "The people who are true sex
offenders will continuously chat with you and entice you into
meeting for sex," Spector says. Dennis Nicewander, a Broward
Assistant State Attorney who handles Internet sex cases, says,
"Mr. Spector is extremely adept at meeting people online and
finding these folks. If you’re going online meeting the bad
guys, you have to make sure you don’t engage in entrapment by
inducing them or planting the idea." As Spector observes about
the Jones case, "When he opens the door, I can walk through
it. I didn’t contact him first, saying that I wanted to have
sex with him. That would be entrapment."

Profile of a
predator

Spector knows something about the
balancing act in conducting stings after nearly seven years of
narcotics work. He bought and sold drugs to snare dealers, but
he wasn’t prepared for what he found when he began working in
1997 to uncover child abuse cases. "It was a real difference
from working narcotics, which was a victimless crime. Here, I
felt I was truly helping a victim — a child," he says. His
first case involved two girls, 10 and 11, who had been
molested by a relative, and he’s continued to pursue such
cases, both on and off the Internet. "I was absolutely amazed
this kind of stuff went on. I was sheltered in narcotics." He
also discovered how difficult it was to get child sexual
victims to talk about their abusers.

Yet his determination to track
down sexual offenders led him on a lengthy cross-country
investigation that made national headlines. It resulted in one
of his suspects, fugitive David Schott Sheldon, being arrested
after taking six hostages in a five-hour standoff in a gas
station in Olympia, Wash.

The standoff in November 1998
ended when Spector brokered a phone call between Sheldon and
his adult lover, Richard Bryan, who was in jail back in St.
Lucie County awaiting trial on charges of sexual misconduct
with boys. Eventually, after talking with Spector and local
police, Sheldon gave himself up. He pleaded guilty to more
than 50 unlawful sex acts with teens in Florida, then faced
prison time in Washington state for the
hostage-taking.

"Everybody ought to feel relieved
that this guy is off the streets," Spector said at the time of
the arrest.

He’s brought the same
determination to this new high-tech arena of sex crimes. "I
got interested in it because I knew there was this need.
People are going to use computers [to prey on children]," he
says. Starting in late 1999, he began taking training courses
affiliated with the LEACH task force, and became a member,
working for the task force part-time from his home agency. For
his work, his department has nominated him "Officer of the
Year" in a law enforcement awards program sponsored by The
Palm Beach Post.

Spector has discovered that the
Internet-based predator often differs from the stereotypical
pedophile, a low-income loner. "They don’t have long criminal
records or any at all," he says of the Web molester. "They
have jobs, wives, children. They are a type of closet ones,
who might normally go to parks to lure kids but wouldn’t
attack them."

But entranced by the vivid
pornography on the Web and the easy access to children through
chat rooms and Web sites, they’ve indulged their fantasies in
new and dangerous ways. "They end up in a parking lot looking
to have sex with a 12-year-old and an adult," he observes,
making a not-so- veiled reference to the Jones
allegations.

"The Internet has become the
electronic playground," says Lt. Paul O’Connell, the director
of the LEACH task force and the commander of BSO’s Organized
Criminal Activities section.

The task force is at the
forefront of national efforts to stem the flood of child porn
and would-be pedophiles cruising the Net. Child pornography —
virtually eradicated in the 1980s — has exploded on the
Internet, and pedophiles and molesters also ease their
isolation by finding like-minded people and fresh victims in
chat rooms with titles like "Dad2Dad," "Dad&Daughter" and
"12yearoldsex."

The proliferation of porn traded
on the Web is truly astounding. As Newsweek recently reported,
when police in 13 countries broke up the Wonderland Internet
ring in 1998, they found computer files with 750,000 child
porn images in Britain alone. And a few key words — like
"children," "sex" and "pictures" — typed into a search engine
bring up 340,000 links in a flash, including such Usenet porn
sites as alt.children.sex or Web sites boasting "older men,
preteen sex." These aren’t mere pictures, of course, but
visual records of crimes: Children being abused and exploited,
including infants as young as a few months old being sexually
penetrated, all of them, whatever their age, at risk of being
damaged for life. (As Detective Love notes, "I’ve heard people
say that drugs should be legal, but I haven’t heard anyone say
that child pornography should be legalized.")

"The Internet has created a new
world of pedophiles," adds Assistant U.S. Attorney Larry
Bardfield in Miami, who has prosecuted numerous LEACH-based
cases.

In fact, all too often pedophiles
and other predators go beyond the illegal kiddie porn that
feeds their sick fantasies. In a disturbing study released
last year, Andres Hernandez, a director of sex offender
treatment for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, found that a
sample of 90 inmates arrested in Internet stings for trading
porn or "traveling" to meet a victim had a long history of
unreported sexual crimes. They averaged about 30 underage
sexual victims each before being caught.

Unleashed by the Internet, this
once-private sexual craving — for which neither scientists nor
cops have a good explanation — has combined with an upsurge in
online usage by kids to create potentially dangerous results.
The fastest growing population on the Internet, for instance,
are girls aged 12 to 17. Moreover, a survey last year of 1,500
U.S. kids aged 10 to 17 found that a fifth of them had
received a sexual solicitation, while one in 33 had received
aggressive solicitations, ranging from phone calls to gifts to
requests to meet in person. Few of these come-ons were
reported to authorities or a hotline.

Undercover operations like those
run by LEACH can halt only a relatively small portion of this
wave of child pornography and exploitation. "There’s not much
we can do about it," Detective Rich Love says, "but we’re
doing it."

The LEACH track record highlights
an upswing in investigations, arrests and successful
prosecutions. Last year, there were 276 cases opened in the
Florida region covered by the task force, ranging from Indian
River County through Monroe County, and 45 felony arrests, a
roughly 50 percent increase over the previous year. Most of
these nearly 300 criminal investigations are either still
under way or have been referred to other jurisdictions where
the suspect lives. The task force doesn’t keep precise
statistics on cases that are prosecuted out of state and
didn’t start tracking all of the arrests by affiliated local
agencies until last year. Even so, O’Connell says that all but
one of the arrests in this region since LEACH’s founding in
1998 have led to a conviction, mostly through guilty pleas.
(That exception involved the allegations of a wife against a
husband in the midst of a divorce.) In fact, attorney
Bardfield notes, "Very few cases go to trial. The agents do
such a great job in the LEACH task force that the lawyers ask
themselves, do they want to embarrass themselves and their
clients when they don’t have a shot? It pays for them to
plead."

This conviction rate comes
despite the difficulties in putting together successful
Internet sex crime cases. Rich Love, pointing to a large file
drawer in his undercover office in a Broward office building,
says, almost with dismay, "These are my cyberchat files, where
they only want to have cybersex. Ninety-nine percent of the
people talk to you to fulfill a fantasy, but 1 percent are
true pedophiles who want to take it further." He doesn’t
pursue the cyberchat cases, but keeps the records in case he
discovers later that they want to act on their desires for
kids.

In addition to such dead ends,
the detectives also have to master a variety of technical
issues in order to make the cases stick. "You have to find the
person behind the computer," says Broward prosecutor Dennis
Nicewander. "They’ll claim that it wasn’t me, that my buddy
used it, that somebody hacked into my system." The detectives
have to have enough Internet savvy to trace the people behind
screen names or prove that the suspect was using that screen
name and computer at the time the illegal acts occurred. On
top of that, the task force conducts "forensic" examinations
of computer hard drives to discover child pornography and
other electronic evidence. That high-tech detective work is
led by a no- nonsense Broward detective, Bob DeYoung, who
developed in 1994 Broward’s program of Internet pursuit of
sexual predators.

(DeYoung declined to be
interviewed, but last year told The Miami Herald, "We’re
arresting firemen, lawyers, judges, teachers, coaches, cops —
you name it, we’ve done it." One of their earliest cases
involved the arrest of a prominent New England lawyer and
judge who planned to travel to Florida in order to have a
sexual relationship with a 14-year-old boy — played by
DeYoung.)

As a result of such effective
police work and foresight, the local LEACH task force has won
national recognition. "Broward has been one of the pioneering
agencies in this effort, and it’s paved the way for other
agencies across the country to investigate these crimes," says
Michael Medaris, a senior program manager with the U.S.
Justice Department’s Office of Juvenile Justice and
Delinquency Prevention.

On the
frontline

That enforcement success is being
advanced by detectives such as Rich Love, who are bringing the
street smarts they gathered in undercover work to the brave
new world of Internet sex crimes. Love, a 19-year veteran of
the Broward police force, began his first case as a lead Web
detective last year and helped win a prison term of 37 months
for John Palmer, a 68-year-old man who arranged a meeting with
a 14-year-old boy he knew as Richie.

"It’s like a chess game," says
Love of undercover work. "I like to outwit and outsmart the
bad guys."

With some of the same instincts
he brought to his hobby as a deep-sea fisherman, Love went
fishing in January 2000 for another kind of catch when he went
online in an AOL chat room as a 14-year-old boy. All he had to
do was ask, "Anyone from Fort Lauderdale here?" and he
received an instant message from GOODDADDY9999, who wrote him,
"Hello, Richie, I’m John in Fort Lauderdale looking to spoil
younger guy." In their online chat, GOODDADDY (who was
actually Palmer) offered him money, a scanner, a digital
camera and a leather jacket for sexual favors.

Early on, Palmer turned the
conversation explicit. He promised to "teach" Richie how he
could be "the stud of high school." He also noted, though,
that it was illegal to have sex with anyone under 18 and
Richie should keep it a secret.

Palmer then followed up by
sending a picture of himself — "a playful gent that loves to
please and play" — and arranged to have a phone conversation
with Richie. Somehow — Love won’t say exactly how — he managed
to sound like a 14-year-old, and Palmer made plans to go with
him to the Fairfield Inn. Until the plans were made Love
recalls, he wondered, "Is this guy for real, an actual
pedophile?" Once Palmer crossed the line from fantasy chat
into taking action, he sealed his fate and played into the
trap set by Love. The would-be molester has plenty of
opportunities to back down from a meeting, and if all he does
is talk dirty online and doesn’t send (or receive) any porn or
try to meet a kid, he won’t be prosecuted.

Yet as Love points out, a
detective’s undercover role-playing is essential to catching
sexual predators in a way that sets it apart from other
undercover work. A decoy cop, for instance, can look like he’s
a potential robbery victim to draw muggers, but, Love says,
"We cannot create a sexual battery victim." They can’t use an
actual 14-year-old as bait for child molesters, and that’s
where detectives such as Love step in, luring people who
already have a disposition to commit such crimes. Why else
would they be loitering in chat rooms with titles like
"12yearoldsex" and sending kiddie porn to
strangers?

In Palmer’s case, he clearly
wanted more than fantasy sex. On the day of the proposed
meeting in a Broward park prior to their going to the hotel,
Palmer stopped by the adult sex shop Romantix Emporium in Fort
Lauderdale and drove to the hotel to set things up for their
rendezvous. He brought along a cornucopia of sexual and
S&M playthings, including dildos, handcuffs, rope, a whip,
adult videotapes (including some homemade ones), a VCR, a
laptop computer and an alarm clock with a hidden pinhole
camera with audio capabilities. ("That camera’s better than
the equipment we have," Love observes ruefully.)

From there, Palmer went over to
the park for his dream date. Across the way, he saw what
looked like a 14-year-old boy with his back to him, actually
an undercover policewoman dressed up to look like Richie.
Palmer got out of the car, stood next to the fence, and began
waving his hands and shouting with excitement,
"Richie!"

Love was watching from a distance
when the cops swooped in on Palmer and put him in the back of
a police car. Love walked over, stuck his head in the back and
said to Palmer with a deadpan expression, "I am Richie — the
boy you have been talking to." Palmer, defeated, said, "I
know, I’m a bad man." Love said they knew about his visit to
the hotel and got permission to inspect the room.

Even the hardened detective was
appalled by the sex toy array in the room that was going to be
used with a 14-year-old. "This was really the boogeyman," Love
says. "This was a dangerous man."

Palmer’s attorney, Adam Swickle,
won’t comment on the case but notes that Palmer, who was
sentenced in February, hasn’t yet entered prison. A peek into
Palmer’s mind, though, comes in the letter he wrote in January
to the judge in an effort to reduce his sentence and explain
his behavior. While expressing "profound apologies," he also
said that prior to his arrest, "I had a long battle with
alcoholism that I believed I had overcome. In addition, I was
molested as a child and never received the proper treatment in
order to overcome the damage caused by such
molestation."

In addition, he faced new
stresses that drove him to the Internet. "My business began to
slow and I began to drink heavily, believing that I was unable
to provide for my wife and daughter as a 68-year-old father
and husband should. As a result, I found myself spending
countless hours in front of my computer. ... I became
mesmerized by the many conversations that took place in those
[chat] rooms," he said. "During this time, I felt extremely
depressed and began conversing with anyone I could on the
Internet, including children. As a result, I engaged in
conduct that has led me to this low point of my life." He then
admitted to the judge all the sex and porn charges lodged
against him based on Love’s detective work.

"I am not only embarrassed and
ashamed, however. I am also pained at the hurt I have caused
my family," he said.

Love doesn’t have much tolerance
for such explanations from predators. "There’s never any
excuse for any adult to physically or sexually abuse a child,"
he says flatly. "Everyone always has an explanation of why
they did it: I was on drugs or alcohol. I had a bad life as a
child." He adds with a quiet anger, "They only admit it when
they get caught — instead of trying to get help prior to
it."

And to Love, it’s the opportunity
to nail predators such as Palmer that makes his work so
fulfilling. "It’s very exciting and rewarding," he says. "I’m
able to take the true boogeyman off the street — the
individuals you were very afraid of as a kid and that your
parents warned you about."

A dangerous compulsion

Sometimes, Love and the LEACH
team not only get the chance to prevent a predator’s sexual
abuse, but also catch up with a molester who’s already begun
preying on children or young teens. Theodore Wells, a
44-year-old Fort Lauderdale computer programmer now behind
bars at a prison in Fort Dix, N.J., learned firsthand just how
determined LEACH — and allied police agencies around the
country — were to stop him.

Amazingly enough, he persisted in
pursuing a sexual "affair" with a 15-year-old girl he met
through the Internet after he’d already been questioned by
police and the girl returned home to her family in rural
Illinois. His case underscores two key points about these sex
criminals: their heedless pursuit of illegal sex in the face
of clear penalties and the growing national — and even
international — cooperation of local police departments, a
sign of the increasing attention such crimes are
receiving.

In the Wells case, Fort
Lauderdale police received a tip from the Center for Missing
and Exploited Children, based on the mother’s complaint, that
a 15-year-old runaway from Illinois was headed to Fort
Lauderdale to have sex with a man she met on the Internet.
Following preliminary leads, they managed to learn that the
suspect was Wells. So, the police sex crimes unit went to
Wells’ apartment, where they found him with the girl. But
since she said they hadn’t had any sex, and there was no
physical evidence of sexual contact, they didn’t have enough
evidence to charge him with sexual battery of a minor. The
mother flew down to retrieve her daughter.

The case should have ended there.
But the exploited children center got yet another tip in
December 1999 that Wells had gone to see the girl in Illinois
and was on his way back to Fort Lauderdale with her. This
time, the LEACH task force was called in, and Love and other
LEACH officers set up a stakeout of the Fort Lauderdale bus
terminal, while notifying police agencies and bus dispatchers
along the bus route. Soon, they learned that the pair was
headed to Memphis, where they were picked up. She was put in
protective custody until her mother arrived, while he was
arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a
minor.

Wells offered assorted
explanations for his behavior before being sentenced by a
federal judge to a year and a day in prison. In his
excuse-laden letter written last September, he conceded that
he did a "wrong and stupid thing," but pointed to the factors
that caused him to go awry. "I had an unhappy and abusive
childhood but managed to make a good life regardless. ...
However, I have not managed to deal with the psychological
damage from that childhood," he said. Still, he joined support
groups for what he believed were depression and multiple
personality disorder (although he’d never been diagnosed with
either). But when he moved to Fort Lauderdale, he left both
his wife and support groups behind in New Jersey, and was
vulnerable to that oft-cited culprit, "stress." If he could
just return to his wife and support groups, he pleaded to the
judge, that would "keep me out of trouble and help me to deal
with my psychological problem" and "nothing like this will
ever happen again."

Love laughs and shakes his head
while reading the letter for the first time. "This is a
typical letter," he says. "The jail is full of innocent
people. They always find God after they’re caught."

But Love isn’t necessarily
heartless in his approach to sex offenders. Take one recent
case involving 19-year-old Zachary Blyweiss, who pursued a
14-year-old girl played online by Love, then sent two images
of underage porn and went to meet "her" at a park where he was
arrested in September. Detective Love is recommending that
Blyweiss, if convicted, get psychiatric treatment rather than
a prison term. Even David Bogenschutz, the lawyer defending
Blyweiss (who has pleaded not guilty), praises Love for his
fairness, and says, "He’s one of the best officers I
know."

Love earned his reputation from
years of catching the "bad guys" since joining the Fort
Lauderdale police department in 1982. Even as a uniformed
officer, he enjoyed the excitement of going undercover in
plainclothes to catch burglaries in progress or serving as a
decoy "john" to arrest prostitutes. When he became an
undercover detective two years later, in the heyday of the
1980s cocaine cowboys, he prided himself on his ability to
assume the role of a narcotics dealer. He’s spent as long as
six months undercover as a narcotics trafficker living on a
yacht, but this Internet undercover work can be just as
demanding.

"I can always grow my hair and
beard long," he says, "but try to be a 14-year-old girl or
15-year-old boy."

He points out, "I get into the
mindset, but when you’re online for an hour and a half, it’s
so mentally draining. You have to stay in the mode, you don’t
want to entrap them yet you don’t want to say the wrong thing
that will scare them away." With a live undercover drug bust,
in contrast, the deal can be done in 10 minutes, he says, and
the suspect makes a quick decision about whether he’s being
set up.

For these tough cops, turning
themselves into naive teenagers for their undercover work
hasn’t been easy, either. Love’s predecessor at LEACH, Sgt.
Thomas Harrington, says, "The only advice I gave him was watch
a lot of MTV." Harrington adds, "He’s really taken off and put
a lot of guys in jail." All told, Love has chalked up 15
LEACH-related arrests as a lead agent so far.

Love, who knew doo-wop music but
nothing about today’s teen scene, had to go on a unique crash
course. He absorbed teen culture in part by closely watching
the talk and dress of two nieces, aged 11 and 13, and casually
studying the world of youth trends. "A few years ago, I only
knew who the Platters were [a 1950s group], but now I can tell
you about Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys." Although
he’ll be 46 in April, when he sits down at his "pedophile
computer," he says, "you put yourself in an undercover state
of mind." So, the next time a child molester logs on to seduce
a youngster, he could find himself chatting with Detective
Love.

His machine sits quietly on a
separate desk in his office, an older Packard Bell computer
with only a 56K dial-up modem, but it’s been powerful enough
to put the boogeymen behind bars.

Protecting the
children

Since more pedophiles victimize
girls than boys, when male detectives from the LEACH task
force go online as girls, they often recruit female detectives
to help in the chase. The streetwise women play young girls on
the phone and, sometimes, even in person. That sort of
teamwork led to the arrest in April 2000 of a 66-year-old
Pompano Beach resident, John Cumberpatch, who traveled to a
Miami fast-food restaurant to meet someone he allegedly
expected would be a 15-year-old girl. (Cumberpatch has pleaded
not guilty and is awaiting trial.) The girl he met there, vice
detective Mercedes Sabina, a youthful-looking 32-year-old, had
already spent some time speaking with him on the phone. She
was dressed to look the part in a ponytail and
jeans.

But Douglas Mew, who chatted with
Cumberpatch online, doesn’t look anything like a teenage girl.
He’s a detective with Miami-Dade’s special investigations
division, a 60-year-old great-grandfather with a ready smile
who has personally handled 60 cases in the six years he’s been
hunting pedophiles part-time. He’s so adept at snaring
predators undercover, he says, "If I can’t make a case in a
half-hour, I log off." He and other LEACH officers say they’re
deluged by sexual offers once they’re online, and some come
from predators eager to set up meetings.

When Mew was online scouting for
molesters on an Internet chat room last April, he got a
message asking for a private chat session. In that very first
private chat, Cumberpatch allegedly asked Mew, playing a girl
we’ll call Mary, to meet with him and have sex, according to
the arrest report. A few days later, Mary was hit on again by
Cumberpatch using another screen name, and a few days later,
Cumberpatch was at it again with yet another screen name. But
this time, he gave out his home phone number. "Mary" said
she’d call him the next day after school. Sitting at a nearby
desk, in fact, was Detective Sabina, who usually does
undercover prostitution work but had grown curious about Mew’s
Internet sleuthing and wanted to try it herself.

The next day, Sabina called
Cumberpatch, playing the young girl her male partner had
created online. Her basic approach: "Just giggle and pretend
you don’t know what they’re talking about." Cumberpatch soon
began speaking in an explicit sexual manner, the arrest report
states. Sabina kept her revulsion in check by keeping focused
on her undercover goal: "They’re sick and you’ve got to get
them." Whatever sexual proposition he made, she responded with
such vague comments as, "Oh, that’s nice." Meanwhile, she told
herself, "He needs to get caught so he won’t hurt anyone."
Later, he allegedly sent to the girl being played by Sabina 18
pornographic images, most of which featured underage
children.

Ultimately, they arranged to meet
at a fast-food restaurant. Cumberpatch was followed by a
detective from his home in Pompano Beach to Miami-Dade, where
there were several officers inside and outside the restaurant
— including Detective Sabina. Even then, he still thought she
was his teen queen as they walked out of the restaurant to go
to a motel — until he was arrested on the sidewalk. "I don’t
believe this!" Cumberpatch exclaimed, "I came down here to
have sex with a young lady." Then he turned to her and said,
"What did you do to me?"

"What you did you did to
yourself," she answered firmly, no longer the sweet young
thing of his fevered imagination, but Detective Sabina making
another bust.

(In May, Cumberpatch faces trial
on seven counts of sending child pornography and two counts of
using computer services to solicit illegal sex. If convicted,
he faces up to 125 years in prison. His public defender, Brian
McDonald, declines to comment on the charges but says, "We’re
preparing it for trial and expect to be ready in
May.")

To Mew, with his extensive family
from his current and former marriage, descending into this
grimy netherworld has been particularly distasteful. "It turns
my stomach," he says. But he’s proud of the arrests he’s
helped make. Most of his cases, in fact, are turned over to
out-of-state prosecutors and cops because culprits proposition
his online character from around the country. In his cramped
office, there are several mementos from his investigations,
including a 10-year-old computer with a 28K modem that he uses
to catch pedophiles, confiscated from his first undercover
porn arrest of a Miami-Dade corrections officer.

He especially cherishes, though,
a glass memento from the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco, who
asked him to go online with his quarry at the same time
customs agents were executing a scheduled search warrant. So,
Mew contacted the 78-year-old pedophile, and as the chat log
reported, the suspect’s final online comment was, "Someone at
the door." Then, customs agents swept in and grabbed the
computer with all the kiddie porn.

The last moments of that chat
log, topped by a toy police car, are encased in the glass gift
that sits proudly above his cubicle. "It’s my pride and joy,"
he says.

There’s one undercover role,
though, that Mew won’t play: gay teenage boys. "I don’t know
their lines and I can’t get into it," he says. "There are some
sick, sick people out there."

A younger generation of
detectives, such as Love and Spector, are willing to play that
role to snare predators, but it’s challenging for them. Even
so, it can lead to some significant arrests. One of those, of
Daniel Sandler of Parkland, led police to discover more than
1,400 child porn images on his drive and nearly 30 alleged
incidents of unlawful sexual activity with two minors. He was
originally held on $14 million bail at the county jail, and
could face life in prison if convicted on all counts. "This is
the biggest case like this we’ve had," said LEACH’s Paul
O’Connell at the time of the arrest last May. The arrest
followed a forensic exam of Sandler’s hard drive and computer
discs that found numerous pictures of prepubescent boys and
girls in explicit sexual acts. "They ranged from grotesque to
something that would break your heart. I can’t fathom to think
where he got them," O’Connell told the
Sun-Sentinel.

Prior to the massive pornography
haul, Sandler had been arrested in March 2000 when he and a
16-year-old boy went to Port St. Lucie for a tryst with a
friendly 15-year-old boy — who turned out to be Detective Neil
Spector. A few weeks earlier, according to Spector’s police
report, Sandler, a 35-year-old aircraft mechanic using the
screen name Sneaky12, started chatting up Spector’s character
— let’s call him Jim — and eventually suggested a "3
some."

Jim said he’d never done that
before, but Sandler reassured him, "It’s fun as long as nobody
gets left out. ... I’m sure it’s worth a try." Spector passed
himself off as a 15-year-old in phone conversations, too, and
arranged an afternoon meeting at a fast-food restaurant in
Port St. Lucie. When Sandler drove in his 1986 Dodge
convertible with the 16-year-old boy, he was followed by LEACH
officers in an unmarked car. When he pulled into the parking
lot, he was arrested. Both he and the boy were taken into
custody. A search of Sandler’s vehicle found a digital camera,
photos of children and a tube of KY jelly.

"He was very shocked and
confessed to us," Spector recalls of his lengthy interview
with Sandler. In the course of it, according to Spector’s
police report, Sandler admitted having sexual relations with
the boy since the child was 13, a former neighbor who flew
back to see him during vacations. He also conceded having
child pornography, including nude photos of the boy. He denied
wanting to have sex with Jim, Spector’s character, and said he
only brought along the KY jelly in case his 16-year-old
companion wanted to have sex with Jim. (Sandler’s attorney has
sought to quash the confession because the defendant was
supposedly not fully informed of his rights to obtain an
attorney during the interrogation, a notion disputed by the
state that will be resolved by a hearing in May.)

Afterward, Spector eventually
learned from the first boy about another alleged teen victim
of Sandler’s, and that led to additional charges of sexual
battery against him. All told, he’s been charged with 29
counts of various unlawful sexual activities with minors and
one count of computer solicitation of a child, while the
number of child pornography charges has been reduced to 300.
His attorney, Melvin Black, won’t comment on the case, but
Sandler has entered a not-guilty plea and awaits
trial.

Yet for every suspect who is
arrested or sentenced to prison following a LEACH
investigation, there are countless other potential predators
lurking on the Internet waiting to take their place.
Unfortunately, the lack of a clear understanding of how to
prevent and treat pedophilia, plus the easy access to illegal
porn and children through the Internet, make it difficult even
for the most effective officers to halt much Web-related
crime. "The criminals have a huge head start over law
enforcement, and I don’t think law enforcement has had a major
impact on it yet," says Broward prosecutor Nicewander. Case in
point: For hardcore kiddie porn collectors, he notes, "They’re
going to find a way to get it one way or another." He adds
gloomily, "The law is a deterrent to those who are least
likely to commit the crimes."

Still, the LEACH task forces here
and across the country — with their combination of local,
state and federal agents — are having as much of an impact on
the issue as virtually any institution in law enforcement. As
the Justice Department’s Michael Medaris observes, in the two
years or so that the task forces have been running, they’ve
made 550 arrests — about 25 percent have been people who
traveled to have sex with a child, while the rest have traded
or possessed child pornography.

All the enforcement, though,
hasn’t solved the puzzle of pedophilia itself. While it’s
true, for instance, that pedophiles have been apparently
molested as children more than average citizens, it hasn’t
been at levels high enough to explain their sickness, observes
psychiatrist Dr. Martin Kafka of McClean Hospital in Belmont,
Mass., a leading expert in treating sexual offenders. "It’s
not a rational behavior," he notes, and it’s compounded by
their false belief that they’re not really harming their
victims. Some treatments can have an impact, such as targeted
cognitive and empathy-for-victims training, along with
anti-androgen drugs designed to lower sex drive. But predators
generally don’t seek treatment until they’re caught, if then.
In the meantime, parents should keep a close watch on their
kids’ Internet use and call the National Center for Missing
and Exploited Children’s CyperTipline if they suspect
wrongdoing (1-800/843-5678) or check the group’s Web site,
www.ncmec.org, for Internet safety pointers. Yet sadly enough,
the most common form of sexual molestation comes from a
trusted family member, not some evil stranger who has logged
on to a chat room.

As for Detective Rich Love, he
hasn’t figured out the culprits he pursues, either. "I have a
degree in psychology and philosophy, and I don’t have the
answer. I can’t tell you if it’s something in the DNA or it’s
a learned desire," he says. But he knows he’ll be logging on
soon to hunt them down: "It’s our job to protect the
children."